“Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.” Arthur Balfour (attrib.)
It took, it is said, seven days for news of Abraham Lincoln’s death to reach London. This was comparatively speedy – Australia had to wait the best part of a month. By contrast, everyone with a phone or TV learned of the death of Ayatollah Khamenei within minutes of it being announced.
The world has, thanks to technology, sped up. But it is not just a question of pushing information through the pipe more quickly; the width of the pipe itself has increased, allowing more information to flow through it. All a Victorian could have known about Britain’s punitive mission against Greece in the Don Pacifico Affair was what he read about it in The Times; his modern-day descendant can watch coverage of America and Israel’s campaign against Iran and call up live estimates of battle damage. If, as some corners of the internet have it, “monitoring the situation” is a key male urge, there is more situation to monitor than there ever has been.
Information on its own, though, has relatively little value. It needs to be interpreted, its significance weighed. We need to decide what we think about it and what, if anything, we should do about it. A rustle in the undergrowth might have been interesting to our deep ancestors; deciding whether it was caused by a breeze or a hungry animal with large teeth was a matter of life and death.
What was adaptive in the African savannah thousands of years ago is not, however, necessarily adaptive to the modern world. Of all the information to which we are exposed, the potentially vital proportion has collapsed. Retaining our Stone Age need to assess the significance of everything we see and hear means that we waste huge amounts of mental energy on things which have no relevance to our everyday lives.
True though this may be in terms of survival, it is probably false in terms of social positioning. None of us likes to be left out. Not knowing what everyone else in the group knows is faintly humiliating. If your friends are into football, not knowing the latest results makes you look foolish. If geopolitics is their thing, then you’d better make sure you know how many missile batteries the Americans and Israelis have destroyed. The more things on which you can have an opinion, the more things on which you must have an opinion.
Like an exquisite sunset, opinions are perfectly fine on their own, but better when shared. What we think about things gives us a read on who we are – and generally we decide it is positive. We think the right things about these events, therefore we are good people. The exact chain of causation, however, is mysterious – do we choose our opinions and decide we are good, or do we decide we are good and choose the opinions which will confirm this?
Our notion of “good”, though, is not uniquely our own. It derives from our broader culture, with a spin applied by the groups to which we belong. Having the opinions we think our tribe has is a way of validating our membership and sharing them allows our tribe mates to validate our membership back to us by confirming they agree in a form of bonding ritual.
Belonging, however, imposes a cost. It may be some form of painful initiation, it may be an on-going payment, or it may be hyper-focus on things which do not really concern us. This Substack has a relatively limited readership. It is unlikely that anyone flicking through it is under any direct threat from Iran. It is yet less likely that anyone in Iran is reading it, since the internet has been shut down. Most readers will, however, have some view on the conflict, a view they have probably shared with others. There may be some impact on our lives due to rising inflation but this may be temporary. We cannot tell yet.
We are, of course, lucky. There are millions directly involved in the conflict, millions whose lives are severely disrupted and, in some cases, ended. But, in a blow to our collective egos, our opinions will make not one jot or tittle of difference to this. Nothing will change because we want it to, no matter how much we may huff and puff, or how many websites we browse.
“Is this something that is or is not in my control?” asked the philosopher Epictetus. “And if it’s not one of the things you control, be ready with the response, ‘Then it’s none of my concern.’” We, by contrast, spend our days expending our mental and, in many cases, emotional energy on things that are neither.
Is it really worth it?
On the upside, we get to tell ourselves we are good, and get our self-worth reflected back in the mirror of social media. On the downside, we become trapped in a perpetual cycle of anxiety and outrage, continually inflamed by the state of the world, a state we can, generally, do nothing about. Being upset about something which directly affects us and which can be altered by our actions is one thing and potentially quite productive; being upset about something which is neither is quite another – futile and possibly destructive, a potential vicious cycle.
Saints, it is sometimes said, are probably quite unpleasant people to be around. Not a few of them have been quite stroppy in their pursuit of virtue. But their virtue has been saintly because it has involved action. They have not just uttered the right opinions, they have done things in the real world. Anyone can say the right thing, share the accepted beliefs. There is no real cost involved. But no cost often implies no value. We can easily end up in a position akin to paying full-price for a fake Rolex, spending far more than it is worth to own a shiny (until the paint flakes off) bauble which doesn’t actually tell the time.
We do like to be members of groups; they puff us up and flatter us – we are one of us, not one of them. But everything has its price and it is not always a price we should pay. Most of the time we can’t do anything about the world, so why act as if we can? Why not leave it to do its thing – as it was always going to – and concentrate on what we can do? There might be frustration, but it would be frustration which was more likely to lead to achievement. There would be honesty too. A recognition of our limits. And our insignificance. Few opinions matter very much, and most opinions don’t matter at all. Can we admit that ours are more likely the latter than the former?
Time to close. The News is on. And this situation won’t monitor itself. I’ll tell you what I think…
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.
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